Czechoslovakia
Kohdk, Erazim
Western media have dubbed Czechoslovakia's breakup a no-fault divorce. Now the two newly elected protagonists, Vaclav Klaus, the prime minister of the Czech republic and architect...
...As for ecology, the prime minister told us that it is the icing on the cake and that we can eat our cake without icing...
...Masaryk, had founded the country...
...based on] . . . the tradition of faith, spirituality, tolerance, education and so forth . . . represented by Wenceslas, Charles IV, Hus, Chel6icky, Comenius, George of Podebrady, the [Moravian] Brethren and also T.G...
...That, though, is entirely incompatible with Klaus's careful monetary policies as well as with his policy of deregulation and privatization...
...Today Czechs 442 • DISSENT remember a Nazi occupation...
...The slogan of the day is privatization...
...The world, finally, needs a conscience far more than yet another president...
...It has a difficult time attracting capital...
...For the moment, they have been put on hold, to put it mildly...
...For the Czechs—and for those Slovaks who identified with Masaryk's democracy—that is the darkest hour, the day of infamy...
...Tourists find Prague an easy drive from Germany, but few bother to make the long journey to Slovakia...
...As in all no-fault divorces, the catalogue of slights is, by and large, both legitimate and utterly beside the point...
...The only trouble was that by the time Havel got up to give his speech it was all over...
...It failed because, except among a minority of Czechoslovak loyalists, the two partners remained you and I, failing to generate the common we without which marriage remains an arrangement of [in]convenience, doomed to failure...
...Economic "growth" comes first...
...Under your Havel," I have been told repeatedly, "everything is more expensive...
...His was a fervent statement of faith in the ideals on which his great predecessor, T.G...
...Now the two newly elected protagonists, Vaclav Klaus, the prime minister of the Czech republic and architect of Czechoslovakia's economic transformation, and Vladimir Me6ar, a former communist, now a nationalist and the prime minister of the Slovak republic, are sparring to shift the blame for the divorce on the other...
...The Czechs have all the prerequisites for duplicating the German economic miracle, albeit on a more modest scale...
...In a referendum, a majority of Slovak voters might still favor a common state, for reasons of convenience...
...In contrast to Slovakia, the Czech short-range economic prospects are excellent...
...This was a man and a leader, nailing his velvet banner to the mast...
...Perhaps October 28, the anniversary of the country's founding in 1918, will prove a symbolically appropriate date for its formal dissolution...
...POSTSCRIPT: After this was written, Slovakia declared its sovereignty, Havel resigned as president, the Slovak government renationalized its nearmonopoly in publishing, and Havel stated that "the new Czech statehood must have its spiritual and moral dimension...
...For the Czechs, the years since the Soviet occupation were a time of political repression, economic decline, and ecological devastation...
...Nationalism is never conducive to liberty: in his last fireside chat, Havel reported that during his last visit in Bratislava a woman handed him a bouquet—and was promptly beaten up by bystanders...
...It would, alas, be a marriage of [in]convenience, doomed to failure...
...The mechanisms that brought it relative prosperity with Czech subsidies and a ready Soviet market for its goods are not likely to function without those...
...And if there is no fault, why the divorce...
...In the Czech lands, they opted for Vaclav Klaus's ultraThatcherite prescription for an economic miracle, in Slovakia for Vladimir Meiar's nationalist socialism...
...444 • DISSENT...
...Riding his electoral victory, the prime minister told us that our task is to combat socialism, not primarily in its crude Soviet form but in the insidious creeping form poking up its horns in countries like England, Sweden, or Austria...
...If humankind is to have a future, it lies in the direction of Havel's vision of civic reconciliation...
...The Czechs, it seems, must have their taste of affluence before they can appreciate the virtues of a living standard free of both the fear of poverty and the decay of affluence...
...Vacations, though, cannot last forever: reality is pressing in all around us...
...In the Czech lands today, the flurry of economic activity is reminiscent of Germany in the early 1950s...
...But the Slovaks are a tenacious, hardworking people with a love of their land that is far deeper than Me6ar's nationalism...
...The two nations have different memories of the communist era as well, especially of its final twenty years...
...For a great many, life in the Slovak state was good...
...The Czechs might well make a similar discovery...
...Besides, in contrast with the prolonged, merciless economic depression that marked the final years of Czechoslovakia, the Slovak state was prosperous, as an agricultural country is bound to be in wartime...
...The Czech-Slovak marriage did not fail because of Czech insensitivity and Slovak immaturity, though both were real enough...
...The Slovak armament industry has been hard hit, both by Havel's decision to phase out the arms trade and by the flooding of the market with surplus Soviet ordnance...
...Ironically, the great achievement of Vdclav Havel's velvet revolution may be that the breakup will be minimally disruptive and even amiable...
...The subsequent defeat of Havel's bid for reelection in two parliamentary ballots confirmed the obvious: the newly elected Slovak leaders are no longer willing to march to Havel's vision of FALL • 1992 • 441 Czechoslovakia...
...That, though, does not speak to the genuine and legitimate Slovak longing for a state of their own after years of often benevolent, but even more often heavy-handed Czech tutelage...
...Whatever the voter sentiment, the two governments are committed to two incompatible courses, each for what it regards as good reasons...
...Slovakia is in no position to duplicate the Czech economic minimiracle...
...In Slovakia, the repression was not nearly so severe...
...Our most urgent task is to rebuild a Western-style society and the new government is convinced that FALL • 1992 • 443 that is the way to do it...
...Small businesses are sprouting everywhere, long-neglected cities are beginning to emerge from ruins, unemployment is low and hopes high, even among those not sharing directly in the boom...
...Yet having achieved what they in turn wanted, the Czechs might find that in an ecologically precarious world a runaway consumer spiral is also a rather mixed blessing...
...It was difficult not to stand up and cheer...
...Whatever the voters' preference, by this fall the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic is likely to have become the Czech and the Slovak republics...
...The sheer ethnic and geopolitical fact of a Poland or a Hungary would carry the country through until the mood of the electorate shifted...
...Both need a vacation from reality and, Havel or no Havel, are determined to have it...
...Though in many ways we belong together, we have failed to build up a shared or at least a harmonious sense of our history or of our future...
...Gradually, it is rebuilding a free press and a democratic educational system...
...Then why the thermidor...
...One of Klaus's campaign slogans was that competition will solve the ills of our health-care delivery system, presumably as it did in the United States...
...For democratically oriented Slovaks as well as for all Czechs, not the Slovak state but the heroic, bitterly fought Slovak uprising against the fascist regime symbolizes the true spirit of Slovakia...
...Economically, too, the late-communist era was for Slovakia a time of relative prosperity...
...For the moment, the Czechs and the Slovaks alike are preoccupied with making up for the stifling years of communist rule...
...Privatization—in effect a sale of all economic assets hitherto held by the government, at bargain basement prices, often to investors from abroad—created a sense of instant prosperity...
...A dramatic case in point is the Munich agreement and the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands...
...His post-election speech in the federal parliament was PRAGUE, SUMMER 1992 nothing short of magnificent...
...With its high unemployment levels, Slovakia needs to maintain a high support level as well, even at the risk of inflating its currency...
...The communist government had, since 1953, followed a policy of redistribution, channeling Czech surpluses to Slovakia...
...When the social and ecological bills of Reaganomics come due, the Czech society is far more likely to develop a democratic center-left opposition than to fall back upon its communist past...
...Restricting that flow might require measures of which Keynes would approve no more than von Hayek...
...What it will mean for the future of freedom in Slovakia is another question...
...The model of the wartime Slovak state is not inspiring...
...So, for sentimental reasons, might a majority of Czech voters, though here there has been a heavy backlash, triggered by what the Czechs perceive as Me6ar's nationalistic histrionics...
...It is not surprising that they failed...
...The Rio de Janeiro conference showed no less convincingly that if humankind is to have a future, it has to turn from its preoccupation with individual affluence in Havel's direction, toward a global concern for humankind and for its natural environment...
...Only 6 percent of the influx of foreign investment capital has gone to Slovakia...
...That, clearly, is not what Havel wanted...
...In the meantime, though, we need to keep the vision alive...
...Switzerland is a case in point...
...The very different development of the two lands after the velvet revolution seemed to bear out that perception...
...Masaryk, and the ideal he held out to the citizens, of tolerance, good will, and human decency, of freedom and democracy...
...Vaclav Havel, ironically, might well prove more powerful out of power than in power...
...Capital is flowing in, small enterprise is booming, tourism is flourishing...
...When the Czechs and the Slovaks wake up from their postcommunist dreams, they will find themselves coping with a reality far more in line with Havel's ideas than with those of their present elected representatives...
...That may well be Havel's most important task—and the one for which he is best suited...
...Self-styled "anticommunists" now like to quip that in the velvet revolution power passed from communists to former communists...
...What fused together its disparate components was the lofty personality of its first philosopher-president, T.G...
...Under Havel's leadership, Czechoslovakia managed to build up the rudiments of democratic institutions and to make the difficult transition from a collapsing command economy to a promising market-based one...
...His velvet warriors, shouldering the burden of power in a society on the verge of collapse, not only managed to prevent an explosion but succeeded in laying the foundations of a free society...
...though there were plenty of witches, there were no witch hunts...
...Though sharing a country, few Czechs bothered to understand how the Slovaks felt about it, and vice versa...
...Alas, it is...
...Both European and global integration make the point that nationalism is a destructive anachronism...
...Two years ago, those same ideals won Havel the love of his compatriots and the admiration of the world...
...It makes Slovakia an anomaly: the one country that has positive memories of both the Nazi and the communist eras and misgivings about what came after them...
...That is what made Czechoslovakia so resilient—and also so vulnerable...
...By the time Havel and his velvet warriors took up its fallen banners, that ideal had been badly battered by decades of nationalism and communist rule...
...Masaryk...
...While leading Czech intellectuals were purged and consigned to samizdat, most of their Slovak colleagues were able to survive in the margins of legality and publish legally...
...From its very founding, it was the land of an ideal...
...The parallel with President Andrew Johnson, struggling to carry out Lincoln's policy of malice toward none, of charity and justice toward all in a vengeful time, is striking...
...Most judicious observers—including the former Slovak prime minister, Jan t arnogurs14— admit that independence is more likely to aggravate than to solve Slovakia's problems...
...While the Czech lands visibly disintegrated, life in Slovakia was reasonably good...
...In Slovakia, the mood is very different...
...In order to form a common state, a human community does not need a shared language or ethnic identity...
...The communist regime, though, made mockery of that equality and exploited the uprising as a communist achievement, effectively discrediting it in the eyes of many Slovaks...
...Since the small-minded ever take a vindictive pleasure in treading upon the fallen great, the muckrakers have set about finding the fatal flaw that brought about Havel's downfall...
...After more than a generation of cold-war propaganda, most voters are prepared to believe that the economist von Hayek's version of economic liberalism is the only true democracy and road to prosperity, and that any deviation from unrestricted economic individualism would be the road to serfdom...
...In addition, they have a tradition of democracy to fall back upon...
...What that will mean for Slovakia is problematic...
...Under Gustav Husak, himself a Slovak, that policy was pursued vigorously...
...Given a Czech parliament wholly dominated by a libertarian right with a strong support of the clerical right, our next four years are likely to bear the stamp of Thatcher and Reagan...
...For other Slovaks, though, it is a time to celebrate...
...In most other countries, the fading of an ideal might be no more than an episode between two elections...
...While Prime Minister Klaus might tolerate Havel as a figurehead president of the future Czech Republic, Havel's commitment to ecology and his repeated criticism of consumerism are too far out of line with the new government's policies for that to work out...
...We are likely to see a wholesale dismantling of our system of social and infrastructural services in the name of freedom...
...What, though, of Havel and the velvet revolution...
...The Czech government of Vaclav Klaus is committed to a radical Thatcherization of both our economy and our society...
...most Slovaks remember the Slovak state...
...There were many discontented Slovak intellectuals, but few outright dissidents...
...Even its domestic capital—the privatization coupons—tends to flow to the Czech lands...
...To many Slovaks, he appeared as another Czech busybody interfering disastrously in Slovak affairs...
...Having achieved their national state, the Slovaks might find it a mixed blessing...
...Hitler in fact did not occupy Slovakia but established it as a nominally independent puppet state...
...The recession contrasts with the relative prosperity of the final communist years...
...Such nitpicking utterly misses both the man's greatness and the magnitude of the forces with which he had striven...
...Certainly, we have other, possibly as strong traditions as well, as for instance Czech scab tendencies [Kolaborantstvi] or Czech garrulousness...
...Having lived in America during the Reagan years, I am rather less convinced of it...
...The Slovak alternative is hardly more appealing...
...In two short years it had gone a long way toward building not just an "anticommunist" society but a genuinely open, tolerant, and democratic one...
...Unemployment is high...
...For that reason, too, there was much less enthusiasm for the velvet revolution in Slovakia than in the Czech lands...
...Havel's hour, it seems, might come sooner than I had thought...
...Yet while Havel's velvet ideas are equally out of tune with Slovak nationalism and with Czech consumerism, they are far more in tune with global reality than either one of them...
...In both parts of the country there remains a lingering affection for the old Czechoslovakia, a great deal of mutual good will and determination that all things be done decently and in order, but little will to seek another compromise...
...Major economic hardship, certainly...
...In it, Slovakia rejected its fascist image and reentered the community of free nations and Czechoslovakia as an equal partner...
...A massive influx of tourism brought in additional huge sums of hard currency...
...Today, consumerism, too, is a destructive anachronism...
...It does, however, need common memories and common hopes...
...It misses the greatness: after years of sordid pettiness, Havel held out a lofty ideal of truth, love, and reconciliation...
...In the election, the voters in both parts of the country massively rejected the men of the velvet revolution...
...Even the Hlinka Guards, the Slovak equivalent of the German SS, were not alien intruders, as the SS were in the Czech lands, but their own, as Slovak as the army proudly fighting alongside Hitler's forces on the eastern front...
...To most Czechs, Havel appeared as a savior at the last moment...
...Though the age cried out for vengeance, there were no purges...
...The Slovaks need to act out their independence before they can recognize the value of integration...
...The industrialization of Slovakia was bringing about a change of life style and a rapid rise in consumer standards...
...Czechs and Slovaks made little effort to forge a common understanding of their past or a common vision of their future, though the possibility was there...
...Not so: the great achievement of that revolution was that power passed from the communists not to their "anticommunist" mirror image but to democrats committed to freedom and justice...
...That state may have been fascist—its extermination of Slovak Jews was as rigorous as the German—but it was Slovak for all that, their own state at last...
...Czechoslovakia, unlike its chief component, the ancient Czech kingdom, was neither an ethnic nor a geopolitical fact...
...A country of an ideal can survive only by the ideal on which it is founded...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
